ROCKFORD - The windchill was minus 25 on Monday night when Deshawnda Woods drove past them. Homeless, Phillip and Melissa Ozier were walking down Montague Street, pushing the baby in a stroller in the street as their 2- and 3-year-olds walked beside them.

Woods steered around them, uneasily, and drove home.

Then she went back. Woods' daughter was scared, but they went anyway.

"I'm a woman with three kids and I (had) seen a woman with three kids in ice cold temperatures," said Woods, who was heading home from work.

"I just wanted to help them."

Woods' Good Samaritan act collided with a cold social service reality: There's no place for homeless families like the Oziers to stay in Rockford this winter. They are staying temporarily in Woods' grandmother's house, waiting to go someplace else.

"We are out of emergency beds in Rockford for families," said Lou Ness, executive director of Shelter Care Ministries. "I consider that to be a public health issue, that we have people living outside in this winter."

Shelter Care is a non-profit that provides apartments and emergency shelter for homeless families. It has 12 "emergency" apartments where homeless families can stay six months. Four available emergency apartments were taken in November by families who were living in automobiles, she said.

Determining how many people are homeless here is difficult. At 3 p.m. Wednesday, volunteers began the annual count of how many people access services for the homeless in a 24 hour period. Last year volunteers counted 800 people who visited an overnight shelter, ate at charity kitchens or who lived in homeless camps.

Shelton Kay, who runs Crusader Community Health's Care for the Homeless program, believes the number could be as high as 2,000 people, who are homeless but finding shelter on the couch of a friend or relative.

Families like the Oziers, who may be staying someplace temporarily and not accessing services, may not be counted unless they visit an agency seeking services today.

They've had help in a two-day search for shelter by Lonnie Woods, Deshawnda's father. So far it has been fruitless.

"Maybe we have to embarrass the churches and the city," said a frustrated Woods on Wednesday. "We need to take care of families."

The Oziers became a family last summer, about 18 months after Melissa moved to Rockford from Racine, Wis. They married July 19.

She said she had been in an abusive relationship there and had to get out of town. She moved here with Phillip, who she's known since the fourth grade.

Page 2 of 2 - The last two years they've been on the move, bouncing from place to place to find shelter. The couple had been working temporary jobs, but neither is working now. Neither has a high school diploma. Phillip said he's working on his GED.

They'd been staying with a friend since November, waiting for a place to open up with the Rockford Housing Authority. They had no money.

But money became an issue where they were staying, and on Monday they were asked to leave.

Phillip said the family had been outside for about an hour when Deshawnda threw caution into the wind chill and picked them up.

She planned to give them a ride, someplace. Then she found out they had no place to go.

"I didn't know them, and I didn't know their situation," she said. "I couldn't put them out in the cold."

She took them to her father, Lonnie, a landlord, to see whether he had a place for them. His places are all rented, but his mother was out of town. He offered to let them stay in her house on Chestnut Street overnight.

"I was afraid you were going to say no," Deshwanda said.

"I was gonna say no," Lonnie said. "Then I saw them babies. You can't leave them in the cold."

But one night became three and the Oziers and their children - Lilliana, 3, Willie, 2, and Mariahyiana, 1 - still have no place to go.

On Tuesday, the family applied for rental assistance through the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program. It's a new federal program the city began using this week, said Angie Walker, of the Human Services Department. The Oziers are among the city's first applicants, she said.

If they are accepted, the Oziers must find a landlord who'll rent to them. The city will then subsidize rent through the federal program.

"They have to find the place, and then we process their information to get it moving as fast as possible," said Walker, who didn't know how long the process would take because the program is so new.

Lonnie says his mother, who has been stuck in Milwaukee because of the weather, is eager to come home. When she gets back, the living arrangement will have to be re-evaluated, he said.

In the meantime, the Oziers are grateful for shelter.

Melissa said if Deshawnda hadn't acted as she did, "we'd have been probably still walking around the streets."